Technology and Tupperware

I wanted to buy a photo album. A simple photo album.
I didn't realize that this was a fools mission until it was too late.
I walked into the photo department. Walked around and around. Didn't see any photo albums. There was memory cards, scanners, all kinds of discs, ink cartridges, USB cables, flash cards. No albums.
Puzzled, I asked the photo lab employee, who was a teenager with pink streaks in her hair. Actually, she wore them quite well and looked charming like that. She was friendly and polite. But when I asked about the photo albums I saw something on her face- total confusion.
"A photo- album?" she asked, saying the word 'album' like it was totally foreign to her.
Maybe it was, I realized.
"Well, just to- put my pictures in," I said, suddenly feeling acutely aware that this was, indeed, an antiquated concept.
She looked puzzled. "There might be some in the Tupperware section?" she said, as though she were asking me the question. "Or you could try a hobby store?"
A hobby store?
Was putting your pictures in an album considered a hobby now??
Apparently.
Over in the Tupperware section there was about one third of one shelf devoted to photo albums. There lay a few albums. They looked dusty.
And perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt clued out.
I mean, really clued out.
Like the time when I was staying at my friends house, and her grandma came over.
"So, you girls chum together?" she asked us.
My friend and I looked at each other. We didn't know what to say. We looked at her, and then back at each other. Shrugged and said "yeah, I guess so," real polite like but then we laughed about it later.
Except in this instance, I was on the other side of the equation, standing forlornly in a Tupperware aisle, looking at the dismal selection of photo albums and feeling outdated, irrelevant, where the only other person in the Tupperware aisle was an overweight, graying lady who remarked to me that the price of Tupperware has sure gone up. I looked at her, feeling annoyed that suddenly, I was in her cohort.
Just because I buy photo albums doesn't mean I care about the price of Tupperware.
But actually, I do.
I like Tupperware, kind of a lot if I'm going to be honest about it.
But in my defense, I do also have flash cards and USB cables and DVD plus R's as well as minus R's.

And then it happened again.
Our kids spilled milk on our alarm clock.
Apparently, alarm clocks don't drink milk.
So last weekend I found myself in London Drugs, walking up and down the aisles looking for an alarm clock.
"Get this one," my son told me, showing me one that cost $199 and was also an IPod docking station, as well as possibly some other things.
"That's for an IPod," I said. "I don't even have an IPod. I just want a plain alarm clock."
One was voice interactive.
One was rheostatic. Whatever that meant.
I ended up getting one that has a projection feature that projects the time onto the ceiling. Rather than sitting up and looking at the alarm clock, I can now see the time as soon as I open my eyes.
Technology is actually pretty cool.

And I'm using my Kindle now. The only bad thing that happened was that I was reading a thriller, and right at the climax I got a little box pop out and say "battery power low. Please recharge your Kindle."
And since it has to be plugged into the computer to recharge, and the computer is downstairs, and I didn't feel like sitting in the basement to finish my book, I ended up having to wait to finish it, which was a significant source of frustration.
I really hate it when my electronic devices die right before climax.
But that's a whole other topic right there.